Pulling more of the reddish-brown dough from the vacuous interior of the Cocucha (named for the town of his origin), he increased the height of the container that slowly acquired its curving conical shape.

Santos, from the village of Cocucho, was one of 240 artisans showing their wares at the Artisan and Municipal Pavilion at the Morelia Expo Feria 2008. Artisans from throughout the state, from Ocumicho, Cuanajo, Cheran, Santa Clara del Cobre, and Santa Fe De La Laguna had set up their pottery, woodcarvings, copperware, textiles in a martyrdom of the senses, a celebration of a selfless ego in which they released their artistic expressions with complete abandon.

A stall labeled Ciudad Hidalgo sold candied figs, peaches, camote, tejocote; Maria del Rocia Diaz Olivarez sold more of the intriguing tamales like those she'd been selling at the Municipal Food Show. From Lazaro Cardenas came macadamia nuts and coffee liquor, and a stall from Madero offered mezcal, bottled chilis and peaches, and tamarind wine. A man from Santa Clara del Cobre, with thick graying hair and a gray vest over his white shirt created a wool blanket on a loom; a few feet away, an artisan from Tarecuato crafted straw hats on a sewing machine. Dancers performed for delighted audiences on a small stage throughout the two-week affair, winners of the Concurso de Alfareria 2008 were awarded for their entries.

Each trip to the feria's artisan show revealed moments of exhilaration. Earlier in the week, a young boy made a fuss over a palm-sized devil mask the color of burnt pine wood and trimmed in white tic marks, one of many spells cast by Barbara Jimenez Pascual of Ocumicho. Jimenez was away at the moment, but her two granddaughters - carefully eating a bowl of beef soup to avoid any drips from their red tops - watched over the playground of colorful figures: bird-shaped whistles with frozen white eyes and flowers flashing across their breasts that seemed poised to fly away from the feathered devils, strange animals with toothy grins in their wide flat heads, winged serpents and frogs with legs jutting from their heads. Other, more tame objects included gentlemen on horseback and women in flowered dresses. A woman in a blue denim dress with a picture of Che tattooed on her left shoulder stopped with a young girl tolook over the images then moved on. A girl with green streaks in her hair purchased an orange bird whistle.

Purchases, however, had been few and far between, said Jimenez's granddaughter, Julieta Ochoa Pascual, 20.

"We haven't sold much. It's the same all over."

Her grandmother had by now returned.

"It's a new feria," added Jimenez, breaking into a smile with jagged teeth.

"Patzcuaro and Uruapan are better. At Uruapan I sold more. I lot of people go through that feria."

A few days later, Jimenez sat next to her wares but Julieta and the other granddaughter were gone.

"You want to eat some of these?" asked Jimenez, her radiant eyes recessed like finely placed black onyx into her sculpted face as she held out a handful of tortillas she was eating with a bowl of hot beans.

I declined then asked how she learned to make the barro. She started to explain that she learned to make barro from an older woman who had since died, then she stopped and said, "Someone else will be here to help you."

I thought perhaps I had touched on a story that was too painful; later I saw her sitting next to ayounger woman in another stall who was holding her hand and Barbara appeared to be crying; later, she sat alone next to her objects with her head resting in her hand. I waited to speak with her another day when Julieta was with her, and several times as I spoke to her Barbara, Julieta or another friend sitting nearby translated in Purepecha. It occurred to me then that perhaps she wasn't competely comfortable talking without someone to translate my broken Spanish, something with which I could surely relate.

With her friend and granddaughter there, she spoke with unbroken liberation about the craft she first began learning at age 14.

"At first I used molds, but no more. It's all by hand."

She picked up an orange bird whistle.

"I started out making these little birds. Afterwards I made gallinitas, toritos, puerquitos. My favorite objects are Nacimientos, pastorcitos with nino Dios, and angeles."

David Santos Alonzo, who goes by the nickname "El Carajito", has continued the craft passed to him by his mother, Juana Alonzo, a familiar figure around crafts fairs. Her large oval eyes watched with detached interest from above broad cheekbones spreading out over her animated face; her spirited lips chewed on gum while she wove another huancipo. She repeated the same pronouncement shared by Jimenez and her granddaughters.

"We haven't sold much. It's the same all over the fair."

Waves of clay rippled before Santos's hands as they worked back and forth on the Cocucha. Fatigue rose to his face, his light magenta shirt bearing the words "BMG Entertainment" rippling as he made circular motions on the Cocucha.

He stopped and dipped his hands in a cup of water, sprinkling it over the surface, then using his fist to dig clay from the inside, the structure slowly acquiring its distinctive conical shape as he extended the walls ever higher.

A woman joining the crowd of onlookers dipped ice cream from the carved-out half of a pineapple, and three young boys watched anxiously with an older man who wore a restless graying moustache and beard, and danger prowling in his eyes. They moved on. A young boy with blond curls wandered toward Santos with a Spiderman balloon before his mother quickly lead him away.

The sides of the Cocucha quivered and warped as Santos pulled more clay from the bowels of the clay being, which told its story now in the splashes of smeared mud imprinted across his loose white trousers. The sides increased rapidly as they rebelled from the confines of their cloistered existence, swooping into the air to become something greater than themselves, a capsule of enclosed space; Santos was now a sort of mad scientist who performed impromptu surgeries on loose pieces as the need arose, dismissing any blemish that would impoverish the perfectionof his project. He sniffled over his bristly black moustache, his beard remaining stoically where it trailed away from his thick lower lip, then removed clay laying on a black plastic bag and added small pieces to the top.

While sales at least for some of the artisans were disappointing, they seemed to improve as the feria drew to a close. Later in the week, Santos was working on another Cocucha. Joyously inebriated, he declared in English, "I think we will sell all of it," after first announcing that he had sold five large Cocuchas earlier that day to one customer.

"Domingo de Ramos is better. We do sell pretty good."

His mother said she had only made a few sales. Two thick braids of black hair streaked with gray and tied at the ends with black yarn fell over her iridescent blue blouse trimmed in lace. She sat on a small stool in her purple pleated skirt, silver crescent moons dangling from her ears as she plunged a plastic spoon into a carton of chilled strawberries.

Surrounded by her coffee-colored Cocuchas, caressed with flashes of volcanic red and burgundy, and brief flashes of purple bronze, she gestured to a larger one about four feet tall and said she cooked it once in the oven and it was priced at about 35 dollars.

"I learned from my sister-in-law, Dolores Molina," Alonzo said. "I began to do this work when I was 16. It's special, all the time. it's an old tradition."

Her son spoke to her in Purepecha for a moment, and then she conversed with two young men, one with glasses pushed over his head who measured heights of her pieces with a ruler. She came back and said she was just paying them forthe space.

"In Monterrey, I sell a lot, more than Domingo de Ramos and Intermex. I go to Monterrey once a year. There's an exposition."

''It's so outstanding! It just makes you feel good. We just love it!''

The 50-year-old Huntington Beach, Calif., resident and her neighbor, Frances Bauer, had stopped in front of some glistening ''pineapple'' pottery produced by an artisan from San Jose de Gracia, but that was just one of the numerous crafts awaiting her discovery at the fair in Plaza Morelos in Uruapan. With the crafts fair, competition, parade of artisans, Purhepecha Food Show, and numerous musical performances, the Domingo de Ramos celebration in Michoacan’s second largest city is reputed to be one of the biggest – if not the biggest – in Latin America; it is Michoacan’s biggest crafts fair and competition, with the Dia de los Muertos fair in Patzcuaro running a close second.

Burns’ enthusiasm for the arts and crafts set up across the plaza was understandable. The images throughout the fair, reflections of fragmented dreams struggling for identity, materialized on clay pots, danced across cotton dresses, and crashed into plates, pitchers, and bowls in a glorious playground of creativity.

There were clay pots from Huancito with Doberman, bulldog and parrots heads; cotton dresses with elaborate needlepoint from Cheran; from Uruapan came the famous maque, or lacquerware, with bright red flowers dancing across black backgrounds; shining vessels from Santa Clara del Cobre forged from discarded scrap copper; toys and wooden trucks from Pamatacuaro.

The crafts fair was an awakening of the senses, a rebirth of identity, a rediscovery of hidden recesses of the soul where the powerful incense of imagination transmitted a wave of tangible passion into the physical world. A color, a stitch of fabric, earth metamorphosed into art, opened doorways where the fragrance of forgotten memory spilled into the sunlight of consciousness; it was a pupated monarch butterfly curled up in the cave of its iridescent chrysalis suddenly released into the Savage Garden of enlightened senses.

Locked away in the shadowy realms of the subconscious, they now became flavors with taste, smells christened with fragrance, pictures radiating with color. The artisans had spent endless hours in their workshops deciphering the language of their souls, and the revelations of their own discoveries revealed a consciousness stripped clean of the illusions of memory, free to explore the boundless ranges of their visual dialect. Now they had gathered to show what they’d learned, and how they’d used that knowledge.

I found myself at once a refugee from the dissipating rages of deliberate action, struggling to unravel my own shifting dreams that yearned for realization. I began to relax as I shook off the burdens of mediocrity, the passion of the crafts fair invading my own worn-out longings, exhausted routines, and spent hopes.

I was delighted to find so many people who also appreciated the intoxicating power of the crafts show, people like Sandie Alden of London who currently lives in nearby Patzcuaro. She had just been looking at the pottery from Ocumicho and was now admiring the goods from Huancito across the aisle.

''Because I live here, I have an idea of what will be here,'' she said, explaining that she, her Mexican husband, and several other Patzcuaro residents endeavour to support local artisans.''We look for quality,'' she said. ''There's something from Ocumicho I quite like, which is a dragon with a mermaid on the top.''She looked over the goods from Huancito, with its distinctive red clay appearance, and smiled.''I like these very much,'' she said. ''I love straightforward barro.''

Carlos Magana Lorenzo, one of the Huancito artisans, looked intently at a clay vase as he gently ran a brush over its surface, the stroke exuding a treasure of sparkling maroon that took the form of an apple. His wife Juana Aparicio Cipriano, 24, worked on another piece beside him, stopping occasionally to cradle their infant who lolled about her lap in a blue jumper; the 25-year-old Magana, his short black hair looking as though it were spiked, daubed his magic wand into a bowl of yellow and showered golden leaves onto the vase around a cluster of grapes poised between two watermelon slices; they joined the juicy mangoes and strawberries in the cornucopia of fruit parading across the piece.

He grasped the neck of the pitcher a moment and scratched his head before setting the piece aside, then removed the paint-stained shirt he used for a rag to protect his black slacks. He picked up a cup and began painting again, leaning carefully over as he became more absorbed in his work, his loose-fitting blue shirt well clear of the danger.

''I have been doing this since I was 10 years old,” he said. “I can make six in one day. My grandparents taught me. I like everything about it.''

Carlos said he and his wife heat their pots between 8 a.m. and 11 a.m.

''We take them out and clean them, check them to make sure they don't have any defects.''

Surprisingly, Carlos didn’t really know how hot he heated his kiln. ''I just keep putting more wood until it's hot enough,'' he says. ''I can just tell when it's hot enough.''

At the end of the aisle from where Carlos and Juan worked, Florentina Rafael, of Ocumicho, and her family had set up their own creations on a tarp near the busy street; red and blue devil masks with delirious eyes and piercing horns stared at the passing crowds, along with birds, men on horseback and a two-tailed mermaid in a basket.

Nearby, the sound of a scraper slicing shards of ice for cold drinks cut through the wet sound of rubber chewing on asphalt. Vendors throughout the plaza sold nance fruit, garbanzos, mame fruit, and macadamia nuts, while children rushed up to sell “palmas” the woven palm leaves so popular on Palm Sunday. A man in a beige guayabera bought potato chips from a young woman pushing a blue cart. She also sold twisting slices of chicharrones and curling snaky charritos, while a row of men do a brisk business shining shoes.

Florentina's daughter, Antonia, leaned her head against her hands and spoke to her mother, her droopy eyes revealing a moment of fatigue while her son sat in Florentina's lap playing a video game, the grandmother’s finger’s interlocked about his waist. Antonia's teenage daughter, Lupita Estrella, sat nearby doing homework, knocking her knuckles against her head before suddenly knodding emphatically and writing a stubborn answer on paper.

Florentina seemed to be at an admirable peace as she watched the crowds go by. She sat beside the clay images of maidens in flowered dresses, black-faced birds, images of the Virgin Mary, crucifixes, and devils driving cars her family have created.

Sitting directly in front of a red devil – with teeth bared and pink tongue hanging viciously out while riding a delirious elephant – was a depiction of The Last Supper. Only in this particular account, the twelve disciples were topless mermaids, each holding a banana. The Christ figure was also a topless mermaid but wore a crown and held a cup.

Antonia said it took her two days to mold the entire work.“The hardest part was the bodies around the table. We made the base first.”The charge was about $35.

The smells of grilling chicken, bistek, and nopalitos emanated from a vendor a few feet away, floated down the alley past Carlos Magana, and collided with the eggs and steaming menudo emboldened with chile ancho, onions and garlic prepared by Jaime Leon and his family.

Jaime and his family own and operate a café a couple of blocks away; however, he frequently turns the business over to a his sister-in-law and moves his wife Sylvia Lepe, and their two boys, Marvin and Matthew, frequently to California where he works in a factory building air conditioning systems.

They had set up their operations this morning next to a small stall where the family of Angel Cuin Juarez of Cuanajo sold colorful hand-carved furniture. Cuin wasn’t there, but his two daughters were manning the station, and Marvin, 9, jumped in to translate at every opportunity. He exhibited an infectious enthusiasm for language, as well as for the chance to spend time with the two girls, Blanca Margarita, 12, and Cintia Hiridion, 9.

Blanca Margarita, with a complexion of deep roasted coffee beans burned into her skin by the sun of her heritage, had busied herself around her station. She had already stepped around the corner to the Leons’ food stand to purchase a bowl of menudo in a Styrofoam cup. Taking her sat back at her small station, she’d leaned over to scoop a spoonful into her mouth, then rolled up a tortilla, dipped it into the watery, spicy mixture, then bit off a mouthful. She’d looked frequently at the 3 or four year old lingering nearby before finally handing him a tortilla.

Now Blanca was finished eating, and with Marvin’s eager help she explained that she had painted many of the items for sale.

''It was hard to paint this because it has a lot of little things,'' he translated for her as she pointed to a colgador of cantaloupe, papaya, and grapes spilling from a basket.

But this was just one of many treasures waiting to pass on a delightful new personality to any home. More colgadores depicted sunflowers rushing from a basket and kissing parrots, and napkin holders – servilleteras – were aptly carved with images of apples and watermelons. The wood had been caressed into an image of polished stone worn smooth by hours of relentless labor. A sun, with bold unblinking eyes, creeped out of the face of a demure, unblinking moon, its thick yellow rays, speckled with faint suggestions of orange, radiating toward a ribbon of moonlight wrapping itself around the image like a protective embrace.

These pieces combining art and utility covered a carved table I couldn’t see, but the chairs lingering around the table gave me a good idea of its appearance; a captivating cobalt blue glistens on the frames, and a woman’s sweeping curves cast waves that echo through the cluster of calla lilies rising like a fountain, the red and yellow stamens lit like a fire against the snow white blooms. The woman sits with her back to the viewer, her braids falling across a blouse whose striking blue matches the frames.

''This is a lot easier, it takes like an hour,'' she said, referring to the napkin holders. Pointing to another piece, this time of a parrot with bold red head and tranquil splashes of deep blue across its shoulders, with fleeting streamers of red, green and blue cascading toward the ground, she said, ''I like this the best. It has bigger things.''

Blanca's nine-year-old niece, Cintia Hiridian, had left for a moment, and now returned with a red-eared turtle she'd bought at a nearby market. All three children and the youngster from the next stall over made quite a fuss over the turtle. Cintia brought a cup of water to replace the plastic bag. The girls' father, Juan, came by a little later and said his son did most of the carving work.

''Juan carved just about everything here, and she painted it,” said Juan Sr., a short, stocky powerful man with a severe jaw line and sharp features, looking at Blanca who sat with quiet reservation in a chair. He knodded enthusiastically, speaking with a biting energy as he spoke about his children's work. Cintia has also been getting involved in the activity, painting some of the napkin holders.

''I am very proud they are carrying on the tradition,'' he said.

They all work together in a small shop at the family home in Cuanajo, and he remembered with precision how long each child spent on a piece. ''It took Juan five hours to carve the calla lilies in the basket,” he said. “It took her (Blanca) four hours to paint it. It took me four days to carve the table, and it took her five days to paint the table. It took her one day to paint each chair.''

I found Florentina later sitting in a chair doing needlepoint. Her thick fingers carefully pushed the needle into the cloth, then pulled the thread out and away. She looked down at her work, heavy eye pockets shadowing her eyes as her heavy lips slowly opened and then closed.

Meanwhile, a little girl stopped, knelt down and gazed in wonder at a clay girl hanging from the mouth of a horned oxen, a brown smiling devil herding sheep, and the clay lizards on the ground. Florentina got up, put the chair away and placed some cardboard on the ground where she sat back down, carefully folding the green dresses and butterscotch apron around her before continuing with her needlepoint. She leaned over and her face broke into a big smile, the thin wrinkles playing a hidden melody as she spoke in Purepecha to her daughter and granddaughter. I asked if she’d sold much.

She shrugged as she broke into a huge smile and said, ''Sometimes yes, sometimes no.''

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About Me

My email: WhiteheadTravis@hotmail.com
Updated March 22, 2011.
I moved to Morelia in 2008 and spent eight months working on a book about the artisans of Michoacan. The book, ''Slices of Life - The Artisans of Michoacan" will contain profiles of the artisans in this state west of Mexico City. I've now moved to Brownsville, Texas and have recently found a publisher, Otras Voces Publishing. My purpose is to capture the pulse of some of the artisan communities and introduce them to American readers by profiling the common thread that binds the artisans to the rest of the world through the universal themes of hardship and triumph and by describing the daily lives of the families who live and work here.
Thanks,
Travis M. Whitehead